Fake Crime Reports Create Genuine Fears In Port St. John

August 2, 1985|By David Scruggs of The Sentinel Staff

PORT ST. JOHN — This unincorporated area of scattershot development south of Titusville has been riddled by crime for several years -- or has it?

Last week deputies said Cheryl Bigos, a 26-year-old resident of this community of 4,400, made 22 reports to their department in the past year. Deputies spent hours searching for criminals they now say didn't exist.

Bigos was charged with obstruction of justice and perjury after reporting the attempted abduction of her 18-month-old daughter. She is free on bond, and her first court appearance is at 1:30 p.m. Monday.

Officials said her reports, along with one actual rape, several burglaries and some construction-site vandalism, created fears that criminals were taking over the 8-square-mile community.

There were rumors that the area had 60 unsolved burglaries per month, as many as a dozen unsolved rapes and one unsolved shooting.

Sheriff's officials met recently with residents who had asked for an official estimate of crime in Port St. John because rumors had distorted the problem. But Air Force Tech. Sgt. Marion Haynes said some of the 150 of his neighbors at the meeting refused to believe official statistics. Instead, a small group, which included Bigos, complained about rumored crime and the lack of law enforcement in Port St. John.

''After the meeting, the people who came forward weren't the ones who were complaining,'' he said. ''Not a one of the people that complained came forward or offered to do anything to help.''

Those who volunteered to help form crime watches in their neighborhoods met again in early July, Haynes said. They divided Port St. John into eight districts, each with a crime watch chairman to coordinate a committee of block captains who coordinate the program.

Six of the districts have chairmen, Haynes said, but much of the actual organizing remains to be completed.

Haynes has used his home computer to help organize the crime watch areas. Using maps of the Port St. John area, he is creating a log of block captains and their areas of responsibility, printouts of which he will give to the leaders.

Maude LaPlante, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office, said the sheriff's crime watch program teaches residents how to phone in suspicious incidents and crimes, how to make their homes safe against burglars and tells residents to ''be a little bit nosy'' about their neighborhoods.

Sheriff's Inspector Rick Shimer said, ''Port St. John has no worse of a crime problem than in any other part of the county.''

Burglary has been the major crime there, he said, because of heavy construction earlier this year and in 1984. Most burglaries took place in unoccupied new houses, and thieves most often took appliances, water pumps and water heaters.

Deputies arrested a man in June they said was responsible for two burglaries of a woman's house. A prowler was arrested three months ago.

''Port St. John is going to continue to have a burglary problem because of the size of the neighborhoods and because it isn't fully developed,'' he said. Port St. John residents divide themselves into those who live ''in the front,'' a tightly developed 1/2-mile-deep area closest to U.S. Highway 1, and those 'in back,'' across the tracks of the Florida East Coast Railroad, where neighborhoods still are woody and sparsely developed.

Shimer said the patrol zone in which the development is located may be split to make Port St. John a zone in itself.

There are four sheriff's office patrol zones on the mainland between Cocoa and the northern border of Brevard County. Three deputies working eight-hour shifts are assigned to a zone. They rotate weekly from zone to zone.

Port St. John is in the largest of the four zones, covering more than 35 square miles between Canaveral Groves to Kings Highway, Shimer said. There are about 200 miles of roads in that area, according to county traffic engineers. Making Port St. John its own zone would require at least three more deputies in the north county precinct.

''We cannot do that until such time that we can staff that zone. It does no good to create a new zone if we don't have deputies to patrol it,'' Shimer said.

LaPlante said the rezoning will depend upon the final budget the department receives for fiscal year 1985-86.

Because there are so many roads so heavily traveled, Shimer said, complete coverage is impossible. ''A deputy can't drive over all the roads there in eight hours. Even if I put one man down there and he did nothing but patrol Port St. John, he still would not know who belongs there and who doesn't.''

Haynes said the meeting with Shimer and other officials was necessary, and Bigos' arrest calmed residents, but he said the fears may have been a boon to his crime watch program.

''Now that the rumors are dying down, it makes them feel sort of foolish,'' he said. ''Now I'm wondering if a lot of this interest is going to die down again and people are going to forget it.''